JIM O'ROURKE - The Visitor
In the eight years since Insignificance, many of us have been waiting with bated breath and crossed fingers for Jim O’Rourke’s return to song-based musicmaking. What has arrived on The Visitor is a single 38-minute track that does far more than reward our patience. Here we are treated to a slowly developing exposition of what’s been aging in the barrel for all that time, carried by the voices of all of O’Rourke’s pet sounds–fingerpicked guitar doubled with piano, sneaky steel moves, and casually colourful drums that slip in and out to provide a little push from time to time. This imagined ensemble drifts through tidy melodic episodes bridged by sparse passages that betray the one-man-band methodology of this recording. The result is a little like subtracting the Fahey from Bad Timing, then shaping it into an LP-length "Ghost Ship In A Storm". Are you with me? This is the stuff dreams are made of.
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